When I get to observations through “Explore,” I can easily select the town of Farmington, MN. When I get to observations through “Identify,” I get a list of options that are not towns and are located in CT, IL, MO, and WI.
I’d like to work on the observations from a school class in Farmington (where a single plant has been submitted under at least 3 species names, one of which may be correct), but I’d much, much rather do this through Identify. Help?
Are you selecting the town via the “Location” box at top, or via the “Place” option within the filters? The choices in those boxes come from two different sources (Google versus internal iNat places), and may not display or sort the same. In general, for filtering purposes, “Place” tends to work better than “Location.”
When I go to “identify” I find first a pair of boxes, species and place. When I type in Farmington, I get nothing useful. Then I can go in filters and I find “place” and I type in Farmington and get nothing useful.
However, in “Explore” the first pair of boxes are species and location. There, I type in Farmington and get the town. Only under “more filters” do I find “place.”
The ‘places’ ones or the ones in the more filters sections are the ones stored internally within iNaturalist.
What has been loaded for most places is maps down to the county (or whatever the equivalent is in that nation). So in the US you would get state and county.
Most city boundaries are not in the internal iNat database. They are certainly not part of the default load, the few that are there will be user created.
In the location box (the default one at top right), searching for ‘Farmington, m’ will list the city in Minnesota. As stated above, these come from Google maps, and are not under the control of iNat. The result may or may not be a true reflection of the city boundaries.
The absolute safest thing to do is likely to determine into which county it falls, and search for that under places.
For some reason, the “place” box, instead of the “location” box is coming up when I use the “identify” button. Perhaps this should not be the case?
If you are only willing to use the Identify screen, then your only option is to search for the county, which is Dakota county, and accept you will get some additional records from beyond the city. The city is not in the iNat maps database.
I’ll do that. I assumed that making the locations unavailable in identify was an error. Oh, well.
It worked. I am surprised how many students in Dakota County, MN (with Farmington) have posted to iNaturalist. Trifolium repens, cultivated trees, and lots and lots of Poa pratensis (probably; it’s mowed) labeled as any subtropical grass with an intriguing name. That’s one afternoon I’ll never get back.